Terminology Retrieval: towards a synergy between thesaurus and free text searching

Abstract. Multilingual Information Retrieval usually forces a choice between free text indexing or indexing by means of multilingual thesaurus. However, since they share the same objectives, synergy between both approaches is possible. This paper shows a retrieval framework that make use of terminological information in free-text indexing. The Automatic Terminology Extraction task, which is used for thesauri construction, shifts to a searching of terminology and becomes an information retrieval task: Terminology Retrieval. Terminology Retrieval, then, allows cross-language information retrieval through the browsing of morpho-syntactic, semantic and translingual variations of the query. Although terminology retrieval doesn’t make use of them, controlled vocabularies become an appropriate framework for terminology retrieval evaluation.